Recently, I completed my listen of the audiobook for Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal. Gawande’s work has been on my list for years. Thanks to my 2016 reading challenge of reading exclusively non-white* authors, I finally made my way to him.
The book is a moving and important read, making a compelling argument for bringing humanity back to the process of dying. As a former believer, grappling with my mortality is something I’ve done deliberately and conscientiously. As someone who would be paralyzed were it not for modern surgical techniques, I am eager to balance my enthusiasm for scientific advances with a reality check about the inherent ultimate frailty of the human body. As the current caretaker to a disabled spouse, the more dire side of the modern, medicalized system of illness and death is never far from my mind.
That Gawande is Indian shouldn’t matter in a book about the American medical system, right? Any good doctor with writing chops could have produced as excellent a work as Being Mortal, theoretically speaking. Yet it is not so. Continue reading “Cookies As Rebellion: On the Value of Differing Perspectives”